


Queen Mab

by freddieofhearts



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Angst, Ballet, Band as Family, Caregiving, Freddie-centric, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Late-Stage AIDS, M/M, Medical Realism, Period-Typical Homophobia, mentions of domestic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 15:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19298140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freddieofhearts/pseuds/freddieofhearts
Summary: They never stop touching him.





	Queen Mab

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LydianNode](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydianNode/gifts).



> General warning for **this being set in winter 1990-1991** and thus Freddie is very unwell. It’s a much less medically-focused story than BTVM, but caveat lector.

_O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you._  
_She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes_  
_In shape no bigger than an agate-stone…_  
– Act I, scene iv, _Romeo and Juliet_

*

It’s a surprise over and over. They never stop touching him. There are new reasons to hesitate … everyone’s heard _you can get it from a spoon, a toilet seat, a doorknob_. Yes, darling, we trail it along behind us. This is our miasma, our nasty fug, the long-expected chastening. Here it is! Give me a bell, dear, and I’ll extemporise the tune. I know the words already: Unclean! Unclean! 

If any of that’s right, they’re all fucked. None of them has ever even fucked him, but they’ve done literally everything else, played the mother, the father, the brother, the friend who will not turn from you – they’ve worn his clothes, slept tangled in his arms; they’ve kissed him, shared a thousand cups of tea, stolen half-smoked cigarettes from his lips – cleaned his skinned knees, dabbed arnica on bruises, mopped up his tears and worse, talked the recalcitrant breath back into his lungs. Time and again, and again. It wouldn’t make you a bad person, to draw back, only a man with a family, someone with common sense. The instinct for self preservation.

After all, surely the old closed-door lamentations about getting involved with _that sort_ have – rather come to pass – isn’t that so? Freddie is sinfully glad that he’ll never have to clap eyes on May _père_ again. 

To the ordinary eye, it would have made sense from the start: to keep a little more distance from Freddie Bulsara, than from those others. I wouldn’t want to be taken unawares by him on Hampstead Heath! Ha-very-bloody-ha. 

One of those bad nights, winter nights, and hour after hour of the frozen sleet throwing itself against the windows. The cats are angry because it’s so hateful outside, and why can’t Freddie inform Jim more thoroughly about the range of acceptable weather conditions? Delilah would never bite, but she refuses to settle, she won’t nestle on the bed. Two of the others are chasing each other, but it’s not friendly chasing: loud, wild, there’s a screech and a howl, and he can’t help but call out, hearing and hating the peevish tone in his voice, “Jim! Stop them, please.” 

For how will they – how in heaven’s name will the poor creatures manage, without mummy? We don’t think about that, or speak of it. And yet who can deny that on colder, grumpier nights there can drift in through the cracks, the faint invisible erosion that comes with any historic property… a hint of it, a smack of it, a savour? To be washed away in tea and bubbles, if you can get out of bed, love. If you can close your mind’s eye to it, love. Forget it. Here is a house full of radios and toasters and soft cross cats to be pacified, and people more than willing to hold you in their arms, wipe your mouth, cut up your food for you. What does it matter if you pay them a wage? Money wouldn’t be enough for most people to live here, to do this. Love nor money. 

There can be money and also love, he is sure of this. In the grey swooping wind, the ice flings itself up and up. Someone’s in a tantrum. And to think of it next year, and the year after, and after that – 

Roger lies on the bed, shoes off. It’s hard to get used to Freddie’s face with the oxygen tube: it looks too big, as if it’s sucking vitality out of him rather than helping. Unmistakably he is breathing easier, though, the harsh rales of yesterday have softened. He’s propped up among quilts and pillows – pink and white, red and gold – looking like a czarevitch. A small waxy face. Two bright eyes. Roger takes his hand carefully and holds it, stroking the fingers as if they are some new-bought work of art. 

Roger says now that he’s always known. _Freddie, it took me about three bloody minutes._ It would seem ungracious, ridiculous – most of all, _ungrateful_ , for such swift acceptance – to argue the point, to say, “I don’t believe I really knew, not for sure, I was still trying to – hoping to try, at least – or trying to hope, that I might not be.” 

Brian used to get a Sphinx-like expression when the subject came up, and that was only occasionally – travelling, late at night in the emerald-black hours when you’re sick to death of the road, of yourself, of the whole silly business. Snatching at conversation is a respite, or pretends to be. We are not old, but only old friends, and this is our common past: this is why we’re really here. Do you remember the flat, the wallpaper, oh, that awful time–? –and the other time? Roger, the chip pan, the grease, oh fuck, that horrible gravy–! I thought you’d poisoned yourself. Easier ways to go, darling. 

Yes, Brian probably knew – perhaps not instantaneously as Roger claims. Brian likes to take his time, if he can. He’d consider it a flaw if he accepted an initial impression, wouldn’t he? This Freddie person that Roger seems to have found. Looks like a flaming ponce, talks like one: simple, he must be one. 

It’s not Brian’s way. Yet he never believed that Brian believed he and Mary had much of a future together as man and wife. It’s daunting even now to think what the silent examination process could have been by which Brian May concluded that, yes: Freddie Mercury is an undeniable, indefatigable, and certainly incurable (many have tried; none succeeded) shirtlifter. 

And all of that said, neither Roger nor Brian shrank from sitting next to him or touching his hand, his arm. Brian would pull him in close to share a paper or an apple. Roger would wrap them both up together in the same ragged fur coat, as they froze their bollocks off at the market. If Roger finds him squirreled in a corner, privately miserable about a song that won’t come right, a man that hurt too much, pushed too hard, about memories that billow up at night and make sleeping hard and ragged, restless, fear-haunted and shame-soaked… If he’s in tears, or near them, Roger doesn’t call him a fag – has never, not once, thrown it at him in anger or disgust – but cuddles him almost like he would a weeping girl. Only getting nothing back from it, nothing at all.

He has offered, of course, in the early days of their friendship. When Roger first showed signs of wanting to take care of him – he even painstakingly explained that getting sucked means nothing, it doesn’t make you queer or anything of the sort. It’s just boys do it better.

“We know our way around so well,” he said, looking up at Roger through his lashes, heavy with mascara that took ten minutes to brush on and that never really came off completely. 

It hurt at first. When Roger said no, it was confusing: because if he didn’t want that sort of a thank you, what was he going to want? It took a long time for Freddie to begin to understand the answer. When you can’t pay someone back, things can be difficult. The price of a cup of tea, a pot of kohl – or Moët et Chandon, a koi pond, a kiss and a cuddle. Money or no money, things do have prices. He wants to be happy, only that. 

Is it a lot? Now with the sleet dizzyingly cold, the whole city rapt as if listening to a story the winter has been telling for hours and hours – now, it seems like such a lot to ask of life. Phoebe comes in with the Vaseline tub. It helps with how dry your nostrils get, stops them from bleeding. Undignified but it hardly merits a blush these days. Roger would have laughed like crazy once, at the sight of someone carefully poking gook up Freddie’s nose. Only now he has fallen asleep. 

After being outdoors, it’s very warm in here, or so Jim has told him. From time to time people do fall asleep, but he likes it; it seems to reveal that they are genuinely unafraid to be in the room with him. 

Brian used to hold him with gentle but immensely strong hands. Freddie was nearly always the one in somebody’s lap, tossed there in a casual fashion because “I learnt how to fall, darling, and you never forget it, not once you know.” 

Or captured, carefully. I am not one of the men who will hurt you. It’s not everybody, it’s not us. All of them said that, one way or another, with the hand at his waist, at his brow, at his wrist. The fingers that came to touch his bruises. 

It’s not even the being-queer. They might have got past that, but once they couldn’t pretend they didn’t know exactly what he wanted, to be fucked, held down, hurt. That even _then_ , they’d still want to lay a hand on him. Oh, isn’t John Deacon the sweetest true-blue late-in-the-day flower child you’ve ever seen, ever known? The humour of the man, the way he forgave you everything. To think of leaving him! To think of never seeing him again. 

All of them forgave him everything, every aberration, every catastrophe. Sometimes he thinks, I was a dancer. Only it is still the same body, the same old bones. The same rattling lungs. Oh, Roger is stirring, about to wake. 

You can still say I am a dancer, because your body still is you, it still contains the steps you took, the shapes your body carved out of the heavy air. The same body that has held note after note of music, and cock after cock after cock. Strangers and friends, some of them quite cruel people, he’ll admit it now. _Arabesque. Pas de Chat._ The windows rattle in their frames. 

To say ‘it’s not how long, it’s how loved’, would be a lie. It’s always how long. Everyone who says it isn’t is only afraid. Who’d even be the understudy for this last leading role? He lets his hand fall lightly on Roger’s head. Astonishing, how warm other people are: how their bodies telegraph the intent to live for years. It would be in keeping to mourn me extravagantly, he doesn’t think, not even for a moment. I know Deaky would hate that. You could manage perhaps, darling – and go home and get sloshed afterwards. 

How one by one, each of them loved me. 

‘How loved’ is no consolation because where does it go when you die? Aren’t you entirely alone? 

How your lungs are the same lungs that carried the air, that sang the note. How your ruined useless feet, are the same feet. 

The shapes your body carved from heavy air. The hands that held you. 

*


End file.
